Cut, Copy, Paste: Clipboard Management December 12, 2006

For me, one of the most irritating gaps in the GNOME desktop is the absence of a clipboard manager. A clipboard manager is a tool that keeps track of all the text you have copied, or, if you prefer, highlighted with your mouse – so when its time to paste you can paste not only what you copied last, but also the n things that you copied before then. Also, in GNOME, if you copy some text from, say, a Firefox window, and then close the Firefox window, you will be surprised to find that there is no copied text when you try to paste what you had copied.

I use Klipper from KDE to manage my clipboard. Its always on my panel. Though I don’t mind using KDE tools, I’d love a GNOME (GTK) tool that does the same. Looks like my wish will soon be fulfilled!

Glipper is clipboard manager for GNOME that will ship in Feisty! It looks pretty much like Klipper, down to the icon and the name, and I hope it does its job well.

Maybe I’ve said this here before but did you know that there is another way to copy and paste in X? You can highlight some text, and then go to another window or application, click where you want to paste the highlighted text, and then middle-click. If your mouse has no middle button, then you can click both the left and right buttons together to create the middle-click. Thats it – your highlighted text is now pasted in the other application. This simple trick evaded me for a long long time, ’cause no one ever pointed it out to me.

> in GNOME, if you copy some text from, say, a Firefox window, and
> then close the Firefox window, you will be surprised to find that
> there is no copied text when you try to paste what you had copied.

That’ll be a firefox bug then. There’s GTK+ API to allow this. Try gedit, for instance, without your clipboard manager. Applications have to opt-in because it’s a huge performance problem to just automatically grab huge amounts of data from applications like the gimp or gnumeric, in every available format. And it uses a freedesktop standard that was created after a lot of discussion and work by lots of relevant people.

Enabling an extra clipboard manager by default will cause a bunch of bug reports from people who are annoyed at the sudden slowdowns. This has been the situation with klipper. I hope it isn’t going to be installed by default.

Presumably, Firefox doesn’t use the latest GTK+ API because it wants to depend only on older versions of GTK+. But now that they are apparently willing to work more closely with distros, the distros could enable use of newer GTK+ API.

Glad to see this is appreciated, great thanks to Sven Rech, our project
conceiver for his great work.

I’m currently working on replacing autotools with Scons for glipper,
splitting it into two versions (GNOME specific and “light”), adding more
GNOME support etc. It’s not coming along quite as fast as I would have
liked, but I’m getting there. (the main problem is other work taking
from glipper hacking time, if anyone wants to help write documentation
for GNOME, checkout the GNOME Documentation Project on live.gnome.org😉

I’m very happy to see that glipper will be in feisty, with enough eyes
all bugs are shallow ;o) With the new build system, I’m hoping will also
come automatic building of .tar.gz, .deb, .rpm and .autopackage
packages. (I will be in touch with the people/guy building the package
for Feisty to see if we can work together with this).

If you find any bugs, have any feature requests (there are already some
features listed on the site and I have more planned) or have any
comments, the sourceforge tracker tools are in place and there is the
mailing list. Check out the website (http://glipper.sourceforge.net) for
info.

X11 (which gnome, KDE, etc are all built on) has at least 2 native “cut buffers”. Gnome & KDE might add their own also. There are even apps that will transfer from one kind of cut buffer to the other.

Anyways, X11 has always been left mouse to select, middle to paste. Sun has keyboard keys for cut & paste that I see people using. I always wonder why they want to use a keystroke when Suns have 3 button mice.

As the previous poster says, I’ve been using middle mouse paste since 1992 on SunOS 4.x and Linux 0.93pl??? on SLS (before Slackware, Gnome, KDE, etc)

This tip works for me. THANKS. (Use left and right mouse buttons at same time). I am on a Win Vista box, using PuTTY to my debian Linux box. I have a 3-button mouse. middle button wouldn’t paste from windows app to PuTTY vi session. Neither would SHIFT + INSERT. But clicking both left and right mouse buttons works.

>You can highlight some text, and then go to another window or
>application, click where you want to paste the highlighted text,
>and then middle-click. If your mouse has no middle button, then
>you can click both the left and right buttons together to create
>the middle-click.

I had the above working on most of my linux machines for
some time now. I have recently installed Ubunty Hardy on
a laptop and the above feature does not work.

Glipper, by default was not installed and I thought may be
installation of it would fix it, but didn’t.

Ok, back in the olden days, before gnome, kde, etc … we used X/Windows. X/Windows has the X-Buffer, a clipboard. You select with the left mouse button and paste with the middle button. It work – EVERY TIME.

Then KDE, GNOME, etc … come alone for FUCK WITH THAT. They break copy/paste from xterms into anything. Firefox screws with it even more. Has FF copy/paste ever actually worked on Linux? Seriously? I’ve been plagued with copy/paste issues in firefox/mozilla for 10+ years. It’s 2010 and still, no working copy/paste in FF 3.5.x?

Sorry, I’m a little pissed right now. Can’t paste a 55+ character password into a forum – or paste anything into FF. I’m running clipman – no good.

Again, I ask, why screw with X-Windows copy/paste? Perhaps I should be pissed at KeePassX?

But over the past few years, IPTV has dwarfed the caliber of DVD and Cable TV.
By this, you are reinforcing that negativity and attracting to yourself
MORE. Trading invites many different sites is extremely frowned upon within the exclusive Bit – Torrent community because it allows anti-piracy groups to
infiltrate private trackers with less effort.